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Man arrested for setting the health ministry ablaze. Photo: The New Dawn

Monrovia — What seemed an unprecedented form of protest against the Liberian government’s handling of the deadly Ebola virus erupted on Wednesday when a Liberian man identified as Edward Wellington Dellay set the conference room at the ministry of health and social welfare in Congo Town on fire in the early afternoon.

It took Maintenance workers who found it difficult to reach the area of the blaze, as the Liberia Fire Service was nowhere in sight to put out the blaze in the health ministry building to curb the fire.[…]Dellay is the first Liberian to publicly protest the government’s handling of the disease in this manner since the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, which has now caused 50 confirmed deaths and over one hundred cases. The suspect was quickly arrested by health ministry employees and turned over to the Liberia National Police.

“According to the information there was a fellow here who said he did the act and he has been taken to Zone 3 at Congo Town,” said Tayson…

Click on post title to read more Ebola news…First Ebola victim in Sierra Leone capital on the run

FREETOWN, July 25 (Reuters) – Sierra Leone officials appealed for help on Friday to trace the first known resident in the capital with Ebola whose family forcibly removed her from a Freetown hospital after testing positive for the deadly disease.

Radio stations in Freetown, a city of around 1 million inhabitants, broadcast the appeal on Friday to locate a woman who tested positive for the disease that has killed 660 people across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone since an outbreak was first identified in February.

“Saudatu Koroma of 25 Old Railway Line, Brima Lane, Wellington,” the announcement said. “She is a positive case and her being out there is a risk to all. We need the public to help us locate her.”

Koroma, 32, a resident of the densely populated Wellington neighbourhood, had been admitted to an isolation ward while blood samples were tested for the virus, Health ministry spokesman Sidi Yahya Tunis. The results came back on Thursday.

“The family of the patient stormed the hospital and forcefully removed her and took her away,” Tunis said. “We are searching for her.”

Fighting one of the world’s deadliest diseases is straining the region’s weak health systems, while a lack of information and suspicion of medical staff has led many to shun treatment…

Ebola: The Day That Changed Everything

And then there was the day in late spring that changed everything, the day a woman, a stranger, came to the home of Cecilia Babyoh, a nurse in the eastern Sierra Leone district of Kailahun.

The woman was sick, and she was referred to Cecilia. Cecilia treated her, there in her home, and then took her to a community health center. There was no talk of Ebola then; rumors and myths about the deadly virus were still to come. So Cecilia didn’t think, not at first, that her life might be in danger from doing her job.

“Then she got a fever,” says her younger sister, Baindu Saidu, a community health nurse herself. “By then she knew it was Ebola. She took herself to the hospital in Kenema. A few weeks later she died there in the isolation unit.”

Cecilia was one of the earlier of more than 140 confirmed Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone as an unprecedented outbreak that began in Guinea in February has now swept through three countries. Médecins Sans Frontières said this week that the outbreak is “out of control”…